Tuesday, July 22, 2014

How Big Data May Make a Future Arab Spring Impossible

To many, the Arab Spring showed the triumph of social media in
coordinating political discontent to force authoritarian governments to
heed the will of their people. Unfortunately, the Arab Spring may also be the last time that
such popular uprisings can be so successful. Regimes that might have
once been threatened by such movements have taken careful note of them,
preparing counter-measures that, with the aid of big data analysis, may
dramatically tip the future odds in their favor. Indeed, these
techniques may allow police states to become more stable and oppressive
than they have ever been before. Acts
by a few regimes hint at some of these abilities and may offer
suggestions of what is to come. Last month, the Ukrainian government
tracked protestors via their cellphones and sent them mass text messages
to inform them that they had been "registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” Iranian police used social media records to identify and arrest thousands of protestors. In Russia, Pro-Kremlin forces used swarms of Twitterbots to drown out dissent during the presidential elections. China devotes over 2 million people (according to state media) to monitoring the diffusion of online opinion within and outside their country, and subtly influencing online discussion. The
ability to monitor and respond to political dissent in real time is
immensely valuable to authoritarian governments, but even that may not
the greatest advantage that social media and other information sources will offer these regimes.

The very social media tools that activists used
to coordinate in movements such as the Arab Spring offer an
unprecedented wealth of data on precisely how political dissent is
sparked, flourishes, and forces reform--or how it fails. Analyzing this
data may offer a host of insights into how to prevent such dissent from
gaining ground.

One could think of it a bit like Moneyball.
In the true story on which the movie was based, Oakland Athletics
manager Billy Beane used statistical analysis to evaluate the worth of
potential players. His methods proved more reliable than the subjective
gut reactions of talent scouts, allowing him to assemble a team that won
more regular games than any other team aside from the Atlanta Braves,
despite having the second lowest payroll in the league.
Similarly, by analyzing the social media data of political dissent in
events like the Arab Spring, governments may be able to scientifically
determine which individuals, ideas, and content actually present a
threat to their own regimes and which will go nowhere if ignored.

It may even allow regimes to predict which individuals are likely to
become dissidents in the first place, even before the potential
dissidents think of themselves as activists.

By
analyzing the millions of data points about which individuals took part
in protest movements such as the Arab Spring (and which of them
actually contributed to such movements effectively), and what factors
were associated with them either becoming active or remaining passive,
governments can understand and deconstruct popular uprisings as they
never could before. Armed with this, governments can identify who could
be the greatest threat and proactively neutralize or pacify them, before
they even become an issue.

Really the techniques
aren't much different from how voter databases and quantitative analysis
are being used in U.S. political campaigns. One senior adviser for Obama's 2012 election campaign bragged that by analyzing voter databases, they "could
[predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people
who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers..."
According to a campaign official, analysts would simulate the election "66,000 times every night" and brief Obama every morning on the results, allowing for a supremely efficient distribution of resources, which is widelyconsidered to have given him a major advantage for his reelection.

It
is generally acknowledged that governments are more capable of
gathering data on their citizens than ever before, even aside from
social media. GPS tracking on phones and cars make individual
movements easy to monitor, particularly with facial recognition-equipped
video surveillance. Credit cards, membership cards, discount cards, and
smartphone payment, and online intermediaries keep a careful tally of
most financial transactions. Digitization of medical, tax, legal, and
other personal records allows them to be laid bare in an instant. Smart
grids will allow for highly specific power usage monitoring. Wearable
computers like Google Glass may make providing video surveillance into a
fashion statement. And standardization of all of this data makes
acquiring and centralizing it just a few keystrokes away. In
authoritarian countries, all of this information is likely to be
available to the government, with little if any of it accessible to
private citizens, giving the current regimes far more information
relevant to controlling the populace than would be accessible to any
dissident.

Even if the data were accessible,
governments have more resources to invest in the algorithms and
computer processing for crunching all of this data to predict how
government reform movements will develop than will likely be available
to most activist groups--at least without external support.

In short, the rulers who were pressured into changing policies or
leaving government during the Arab Spring may have been blindsided by
the unexpected use of new technologies to organize anti-government
voices, but the ones remaining know that these technologies cannot be
ignored. Unfortunately, the transparency of social media makes it a rich
source of data for regimes to understand and predict popular dissent,
granting them far more calculated and effective means of crushing it.

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